CAC Brétigny

Pepper Perceval is dedicated to exploring the term “empathy” in its psychological and philosophical dimensions in connection with recent technological developments. This event aims first to highlight the relationship between emotion and politics. How may emotion be a form of recognition, a way to achieve greater equality in society?

Secondly the project questions the term “otherness” as part of the interactions between humans and machines. Pepper Perceval spans a number of different eras (from the Middle Ages up to the present) and different generations. It is a laboratory that also entails several workshops, including a choir, a number of reading groups, debates, and other activities, all of which will come together in a final representation featuring both a performance and an exhibition. An artist’s film will also be developed around the event.

The starting point of the project is the story of Percival the knight of the Round Table (Chrétien de Troyes/Wolfram von Eschenbach), who dared not put to the wounded king the question that could have cured him, “What is it that makes you ill?”. It is this lack of empathy and compassion in Percival that lies at the heart of the project, for empathy is above all an activity that questions the connections between oneself and others. What is it that hinders us from showing empathy—coined from the Greek em (in) and patheia (suffering)—to dare to make one’s way over to the other, to “enter” another’s suffering?

From January to March 2018 Marlies Pöschl will be present here to carry out her project called Pepper Perceval. She will be active in structures that enable the public to question their connection with others by first interrogating their relationship to machines and robots. Adults will be able to give voice to feelings and emotions sparked by electronic objects and talk with young people about these singular individual experiences. School children will do sketches of futurist robots that will be able to interact and communicate. These robots will come to life, created during workshops in a high school. The final record of these initiatives will take the form of a film conceived and written by the inhabitants of the territory. Between science fiction and epic, the film will transmit all of the robotic, human and intergenerational exchanges that occur during Marlies Pöschl’s residency.

Pepper Perceval takes place within the residency mission of CAC Brétigny beginning in September of 2017. Cœur d’Essonne Agglomération is kicking off in 2017 a three-year partnership with the Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Île-de-France and the Academy of Versailles with the signing of a Local Arts Education Contract in partnership with the Department of the Essonne. This residency mission was conceived and developed for the region’s inhabitants, especially local young people, and starts from a network of school establishments, associations, and cultural, social, sociocultural, economic and educational entities in Cœur d’Essonne Agglomération. 

Born in1982 in Oberndorf (Salzburg, Austria), Marlies Pöschl lives and works in Vienna (Austria). Following studies in linguistics as well as art and communications, Pöschl entered Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, where she took a degree in 2014. Collaboration, joint art making, and common utopias lie at the heart of her work since 2011. She is the founder of Golden Pixel Cooperative, a platform for artists’ films she has worked with when putting together a range of exhibitions and public events in Austria (Kunsthalle Exnergasse, 2016; 21er Haus, Vienna, 2016) and Iran (Limited Access Festival, Tehran, 2014). Her work has also been featured in solo shows, notably at the Donaufestival Krems (Austria, 2016), MUSA Museum auf Abruf of Vienna (2015), the Gallery 5020 in Salzburg (2015), and Studios Lenikus in Vienna (2015). Her films have been screened at a number of festivals, including the Austrian Film Festival Diagonale (Austria, 2016); Edinburgh International Film Festival (United Kingdom 2014); and the Berlin Short Film Festival (Germany, 2014). Marlies Pöschl is currently in residence at the Cité internationale des arts through the residency program of the Institut français.

For further information about this project, please contact Julie Kremer in charge of public outreach: j.kremer@coeuressonne.fr